This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Police forces around the world have often been criticized for racial profiling and for acting with unnecessary force. After being a victim of racial profiling himself, activist Jami Jivani wanted to change the way that the police engage with local citizens. In his TEDxToronto talk, Jamil discusses the importance of mediating the relationship between the police and the public. Though there may be fundamental flaws in the system, Jamil believes that by developing a dialogues with police officials, we can initiate positive change.

Jami Jivani is a 2014-15 articling student at Torys LLP and founder of the Policing Literacy Initiative. He formerly worked as a consultant for businesses and charities across Canada. While in law school, Jamil taught constitutional law as a part-time high school teacher and was President of the Yale Black Law Students Association. Jamil’s community involvement in Toronto includes serving on the Board of Directors of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, York University, and Humber College.

His seat neighbour incorrectly identified his equations for another language or code

Feliks Garcia, New York

7 May 2016

An Ivy League economist was escorted off an American Airlines plane after a fellow passenger incorrectly identified the mathematical equations he was scrawling for Arabic script, and suspected him of terrorism.

Italian economist Guido Menzio, 40, was en route to Syracuse to catch a connecting flight to Ontario, where he was scheduled to present a paper at Queen’s University. His neighbor had witnessed him scribbling the equations and subsequently handed a flight attendant a note. The unidentified passenger had tried to make small talk with Mr Menzio, who was too focused on working out the maths he was about to present at the university, according to the Washington Post.

The plane remained on the tarmac for an extended period of time, as the passenger wary of Mr Menzio had feigned sickness, and the pilots steered the craft back to the gate. Airline personnel escorted the passenger off, but shortly after requested Mr Menzio to also step out of the plane.

American Airlines spokesman Casey Norton told the Post that the passenger, whom he was not at liberty to identify over privacy concerns, revealed that she had felt ill because of the perceived behaviour of her neighbour, Mr Menzio, an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr Menzio was questioned by “some sort of agent” who told him he was suspected of terrorism, but he was ultimately deemed not a “credible threat” after showing what he had been writing.

Although Mr Menzio said he was “treated respectfully throughout”, he criticised airline protocols that fail to collect sufficient intelligence in situations like these. Airlines have “a security protocol that is too rigid – in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks – and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless,” he said.

Hank unravels the fascinating yarn of how the world came to use so-called Arabic numerals — from the scholarship of ancient Hindu mathematicians, to Muslim scientist Al-Khwarizmi, to the merchants of medieval Italy.

Conservative Florida mom vows to stop her children from learning about Islam and Arabic numerals

06 Oct 2015 at 14:29 ET

A Florida mom posted a rambling 15 minute video to her Facebook account complaining that her son’s high school world history class textbook spends an entire chapter on Muslims and advances in the Islamic world, including the “origin of Ay-rabic numerals.”

According to the post by Christian Kayla Normandin, she had previously promised to share a video detailing objections she has with the history book being used in her son’s class. …

Touching upon developments in education, astronomy, architecture, art, agriculture, science and mathematics in the Islamic world, Normandin drew attention to the development of the Arabic numeric system — the most common numeric system used in the world today.

“It even has the origin of ‘Ay-rabic’ numerals,” she read from the book …

Following her review of the chapter, Normandin asserted, “We need to stand up against this, y’all. Our children don’t need to be taught this. It’s not teaching them facts. It’s not teaching them truth. It’s basically telling them that this is going to be the way of life.”

She went on to state that she will go as far as she needs to go to get the textbook pulled, saying, “My children aren’t going to learn this.”

Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. Natalya St. Clair illustrates how Van Gogh captured this deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work.

A flock of starlings flies as one, a spectacular display in which each bird flits about as if in a well-choreographed dance. Everyone seems to know exactly when and where to turn. Now, for the first time, researchers have measured how that knowledge moves through the flock—a behavior that mirrors certain quantum phenomena of liquid helium.

“This is one of the first studies that gets to the details of how groups move in unison,” says David Sumpter of Uppsala University in Sweden, who was not part of the study.

The remarkable accord with which starling flocks fly has long puzzled researchers and bird watchers alike. In the 1930s, the ornithologist Edmund Selous even suggested that the birds cooperate via telepathy. Researchers have since turned to more scientifically sound ideas, using mathematical models.

In the 1990s, physicist Tamás Vicsek of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest came up with one of the more successful models, which is based on the principle that each bird flies in the same direction as its neighbors. If a bird angles right, the ones next to it will turn to stay aligned. Although this model reproduces many features well—how a flock swiftly aligns itself from a random arrangement, for example—a team of researchers from Italy and Argentina has now discovered that it doesn’t accurately describe in detail how flocks turn.

In their new study, the team, led by physicists Andrea Cavagna and Asja Jelic of the Institute for Complex Systems in Rome, used high-speed cameras to film starlings—which are common in Rome and form spectacular flocks—flying near a local train station. Using tracking software on the recorded video, the team could pinpoint when and where individuals decide to turn, information that enabled them to follow how the decision sweeps through the flock. The tracking data showed that the message to turn started from a handful of birds and swept through the flock at a constant speed between 20 and 40 meters per second. That means that for a group of 400 birds, it takes just a little more than a half-second for the whole flock to turn.

“It’s a real tour de force of measurement,” says Sriram Ramaswamy of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad, India, who wasn’t part of the research.

The fact that the information telling each bird to turn moves at a constant speed contradicts the Vicsek model, Cavagna says. That model predicts that the information dissipates, he explains. If it were correct, not all the birds would get the message to turn in time, and the flock wouldn’t be able to fly as one.

The team proposes that instead of copying the direction in which a neighbor flies, a bird copies how sharply a neighbor turns. The researchers derived a mathematical description of how a turn moves through the flock. They assumed each bird had a property called spin, similar to the spins of elementary particles in physics. By matching one another’s spin, the birds conserved the total spin of the flock. As a result of that conservation, the equations showed that the information telling birds to change direction travels through the flock at a constant speed—exactly as the researchers observed. It’s this constant speed that enables everyone to turn in near-unison, the team reports online today in Nature Physics.

The new model also predicts that information travels faster if the flock is well aligned—something else the team observed, Cavagna says. Other models don’t predict or explain that relationship. “This could be the evolutionary drive to have an ordered flock,” he says, because the birds would be able to maneuver more rapidly and elude potential predators, among other things.

Interestingly, Cavagna adds, the new model is mathematically identical to the equations that describe superfluid helium. When helium is cooled close to absolute zero, it becomes a liquid with no viscosity at all, as dictated by the laws of quantum physics. Every atom in the superfluid is in the same quantum state, exhibiting a cohesion that’s mathematically similar to a starling flock.

The similarities are an example of how deep principles in physics and math apply to many physical systems, Cavagna says. Indeed, the theory could apply to other types of group behavior, such as fish schools or assemblages of moving cells, Sumpter says.

Other models, such as the Vicsek model or others that treat the flock as a sort of fluid, probably still describe flock behavior over longer time and length scales, Ramaswamy says. But it’s notable that the new model, which is still based on relatively simple principles, can accurately reproduce behavior at shorter scales. “I think that’s cool,” he says. “That’s an achievement, really.”

Sumpter agrees. “It’s kind of reassuring we don’t need to think about the telepathic explanation,” he says.

Swedish Education Minister Jan Bjorklund admitted that his government should have renationalised the country’s failing privatised schools seven years ago.

State broadcaster Sveriges Television published figures on Monday showing that 61 per cent of Swedes thought the government should take over, while only 12 per cent disagreed.

Two decades into a controversial free-market experiment about a quarter of Sweden’s secondary school students now attend privately run schools.

And nearly half of them study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.

The collapse of JB Education earlier this year, a firm owned by Danish private equity firm Axcel, cost almost 1,000 staff their jobs and left more than a billion kronor (£92 million) of debt to banks and suppliers, as well as abandoning 11,000 students.

With elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, which are accused of putting profits first with practices like performance-based bonuses to staff and advertising in the capital Stockholm’s underground system.

“I think we have had too much blind faith that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality,” said parliamentary education committee head and education spokesman for the ruling Moderate party Tomas Tobe.

The “Moderate party” are the conservatives in Sweden.

The opposition Green Party, which like the Moderates was a long-time supporter of privately run schools, issued a public apology in a Swedish paper last month saying: “forgive us, our policy led our schools astray.”

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics — work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor. She is now a Visiting Professor in Oxford.

Unearthing the hidden women of science and inspiring the next generation

08 May 2013

A group of historians and scientists is about to embark on a major project to scrutinise the role of British women in science. It will focus on finding and assessing the careers of scientific women who may not have received credit or recognition for their work. The £33k project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and run jointly by Kingston University, University of Liverpool, the Royal Society and the Rothschild Archive London, aims to examine how women were involved in scientific societies between the years 1830 to 2012 and look at how that can inform policy today.

It will involve the establishment of a network of academics to gain a better understanding of how historical perspectives might impact future education policy making. Recent statistics show that only a third of science, technology, engineering and maths students in Britain are female and just 11 per cent of senior positions in science are held by women.

“Women’s unequal participation in science subjects at all levels, both in education, academia and in industry, is currently receiving close attention from policy makers, educationalists and social commentators,” project leader Dr Susan Hawkins, a senior history lecturer from Kingston University, said. “Part of the purpose of our work will be to closely examine data on women in science in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The hope is that by looking at women’s relationship with science in the past, we can pinpoint ways to encourage young women to participate more fully in the subject.”

There was a wealth of historical information which could open a window into the past but it was often dispersed across different archives, Dr Hawkins, who originally trained as a scientist, explained. “Through the network we hope to identify where these archives are and what revelatory material they may contain.” Part of the project will involve a shadowing scheme which will allow researchers studying the history of science to spend time alongside a female scientist in the laboratory, gaining an understanding of how science works today and the challenges faced by women in the field.

The network will be organised around a series of events, including three workshops, a two-day international conference to be held at the Royal Society in May 2014 and an exhibition open to the public. The first workshop will aim to identify archives that may contain information on women in science. It will concentrate on two groups of women – those whose work was recognised by the scientific community of their time and those who, despite producing work of high standard, were not. “The intention is to look at the characteristics that link the two groups of women and also to find out what set them apart,” Dr Hawkins added. Another workshop will focus on identifying possible oral history projects.

“The final workshop will pull together the findings from the first two events and allow us to make recommendations to government on future projects to help increase female participation in science,” Dr Hawkins said.

The issue of the representation of women in science has dominated headlines in the media in recent months. According to a report in last month’s Independent newspaper, female professors account for 5.5 per cent in physics, 6 per cent in chemistry and maths and just 2 per cent in engineering. This has prompted growing calls for better representation of women in science both in universities and in industry – a sentiment also echoed by Kingston University’s new Chancellor American playwright and author Bonnie Greer. “It is crucial that women continue to take up the study of science and maths as historically women have been kept out of these professions, so who knows what genius has been lost?” she said recently. “When you think of all the big problems that are out there waiting to be solved, every ounce of human intelligence is needed.”

Things were extremely tough for women in science in the past and they often did not receive proper recognition, according to Dr Hawkins. “It was a real struggle. For instance, the Royal Society didn’t accept female fellows until as late as 1945,” she said. “There were women in the scientific field but they really had to fight to be recognised, independent of any men they might have been working with.”

Guests from around the world will attend a launch event for the project at the International Congress for the History of Science Technology and Medicine to be held in Manchester in July.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE “‘It’s death by a thousand cuts. Every day you’re faced with some comment, some snide remark, some inability to get a name on a research paper. And with an accumulation of those experiences, women tend to walk with their feet.’ That’s Janet Bandows Koster, executive director of the Association for Women in Science explaining one of the reasons why so few women pursue science careers — and why those who do often abandon them.” [HuffPost]

USA: THE WORLD OF WOMEN SURGEONS “It is not sufficient to simply find more women willing to survive in the male-driven world of surgery. Until we recognize that the culture of the surgical institution needs to strive for a more cohesive and balanced environment, women will continue to avoid surgical training, and we will lose competent, intelligent women to other fields. Recognition of stereotyping won’t be enough.” [HuffPost]

February 2013. Humans alone were responsible for the demise of Australia’s iconic extinct native predator, the Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine, according to a new study led by the University of Adelaide.

Using a new population modelling approach, the study contradicts the widespread belief that disease must have been a factor in the thylacine’s extinction.

Government sponsored hunting

The thylacine was a unique marsupial carnivore found throughout most of Tasmania before European settlement in 1803. Between 1886 and 1909, the Tasmanian government encouraged people to hunt thylacines and paid bounties on over 2000 thylacine carcasses. Only a handful of animals were located after the bounty was lifted and the last known thylacine was captured from the wild in 1933.

“Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible,” says the project leader, Research Associate Dr Thomas Prowse, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Environment Institute.

“We tested this claim by developing a ‘metamodel’ – a network of linked species models – that evaluated whether the combined impacts of Europeans could have exterminated the thylacine, without any disease.”

The mathematical models used by conservation biologists to simulate the fate of threatened species under different management strategies (called population viability analysis or PVA) traditionally neglect important interactions between species. The researchers designed a new approach to PVA that included species interactions.

“The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine’s prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep,” Dr Prowse says.

Disease not a factor

“We found we could simulate the thylacine extinction, including the observed rapid population crash after 1905, without the need to invoke a mystery disease. We showed that the negative impacts of European settlement were powerful enough that, even without any disease epidemic, the species couldn’t escape extinction.”